May Road Trip

On Saturday May 2nd I made plans to head out on a road trip.  Initially Margarit was going to come along, but she is still recovering from a bad cold and decided to take a rain check.  Hailey decided to come along with me and once again, like on the Spring Photo Weekend, Daughter and Dad were on the road with our cameras.

We left the city early in the morning and were on the road with a coffee and a full tank of fuel by about 7:30AM.  We headed south to Big Valley, as I wanted to shoot a couple of old abandonded school houses in the area.  I had done some research on line on various photo sites and confirmed locations and coordinates with maps and on Google Earth.  

It was partly overcast, cool and fairly windy.  Though the sun would come out and the temperature would rise during the day, the wind remained with us all day long.  Our first stop was at an old school house that had been converted to a home.  It was completely abandoned and vandalized.  We explored here a little before heading on to a second schoolhouse.

This one was an older one, and the site at least, if not the building, was 100 years old.  The building itself had obviously been used as a granary in the past and was now empty.  Like many old buildings the floor is caving in and the roof is failing.  It is not long for this world.  We photographed here for an hour or so and then continued on.

In recent weeks I have been in email contact with Chris of the BigDoer blog in Calgary.  He and his wife Connie are historians, researchers, journalists and photographers with similar interests to mine.

http://www.bigdoer.com/

We had arranged to meet at an old abandoned house near the village Carbon.  It took me a bit longer than I expected to get across country from the Big Valley area to where we had arranged to meet with Chris and Connie.  I spoke to them on the cell phone to let them know we were on our way, and they were waiting when we arrived.  After some quick introductions, as this was the first time any of us had met face to face, we packed up our gear and set off across the pasture.  This interesting old house was about half a mile across a pasture, in a small coulee.  It was a fascinating old house and very picturesque.  It too had been vandalized a little, but mostly it was deteriorating and falling down.  We found some old newspapers and magazines inside that dated back to 1945.  There were also a couple of pages of hand written notes that seemed as if they were part of someones school science project.  Interestingly enough these notes discussed optics and light and had a diagram of a view camera and a description of how it was used to take a photograph.  What an unusual coincidence considering the fact that this what I had come out to do.  We spent a couple hours photographing and exploring here before hiking back out to our vehicles.  I carried my 4x5 camera outfit in a backpack, my digital camera around my neck, my heavy wood tripod in one hand, and a case of medium format camera gear that Hailey was using, in my other hand.  I commented that I felt like a Sherpa...!!  Out of curiousity I weighed all this gear when I got home just to see how much I was really packing.  It came in at 81Lbs.  No wonder my back was tired the next morning!

After hiking out from the old house we set off to an abandoned P&H Elevator just a few miles down the road at Sharples.  This one is pretty photogenic, and by this time the clouds had broken a little.  We still had that gawd-awful wind to deal with, but the light was nice.  We explored here for a while and then set off into Drumheller for a late lunch.  It must have been around 3:30 by the time we sat down for lunch and all of us were very hungry.

After lunch we headed off down the valley to East Coulee.  I needed to check a couple things on our trailer which we stored in the shop over the winter.  I also gave Chris and Connie a quick tour of the facility.  Although there aren't really any paleo projects on the go right now, they still found it pretty interesting.  To close out the day we took a short walk across the old timber bridge at East Coulee.  We noticed that one section of the bridge is beginning to settle and fail.  The decay of some of the main timbers has caused the south truss to settle about 4 inches at the last pier.  There is now a noticeable hump in the deck, and some of the cross bracing has become dislodged.  It was certainly more than solid enough for a few pedestrians, but I wonder how long this one will remain standing.

After our walk we said our good byes to Chris and Connie.  They headed back for home in Calgary and Hailey and I hit the road for Edmonton.   By this time is was a little after 7:00 and we knew it would be after 10:00 before we got home.  Neither of us were hungry after the late lunch but we made a couple of brief stops along the way home just to stretch and relax a little after a long day of hiking and driving.  An ice cream stop in Stettler and a coffee stop in Lacombe and by shortly after 10:00PM we rolled up in front of the house.  It was a really fun day and Hailey has become quite comfortable and proficient with the Hasselblad.  Now I'm anxious to process some of this film...!!